Mercy Me, It's Murtha

We haven't had any Blagogate-sized problems with the Democrats in a few months, mostly it's been various GOP governors doing idiotic things along with the C-Street Gang here since April...but that just might be about to change.

Is the noose tightening around John Murtha?

For months now, the Pennsylvania Democratic power-broker's name has been popping up in connection to a wide-ranging FBI investigation of defense contractors and lobbyists to whom he has ties. And yesterday brought more bad news...

Mark O'Hair, a former Air Force employee pleaded guilty (sub. req.) Monday in connection to getting a kickback from a defense contract that Murtha, who chairs the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, had provided.

Roll Call reports:

According to the plea agreement, filed in a federal court in Florida, in May 2005, "Congress passed a tsunami relief act which included within the provisions of the act an $8.2 million earmark for the development of the 'Mobile Common Data Link Gateway.' Coherent Systems International, Inc. (CSI) had lobbied for this earmark appropriation."

Roll Call reported in June that Coherent was represented by KSA Consulting, the lobbying firm that employed Murtha's brother, Kit, and that the Congressman had provided this earmark to Coherent by eliminating the same sum from a project that had been designated for a previous client of his brother's firm.

The O'Hair case appears to begin tying together the other strands of the FBI probe that has put Murtha -- who frequently appears on good-government groups' lists of the most corrupt lawmakers -- in the spotlight. In addition to the Coherent payment, O'Hair also approved a payment of $650,000 -- for products that were not part of the contact -- to Kuchera Industries, another defense contractor with close ties to Murtha. (Its founder, Bill Kuchera, has said, that the company would not exist were it not for Murtha.) Kuchera's headquarters were raided by the FBI earlier this year, and in May, the Navy suspended Kuchera after tips from company insiders suggested that taxpayers may have been billed improperly for Kuchera family expenses.

And O'Hair also approved a payment to another company that was represented by the PMA Group, a now-defunct lobbying firm founded by Murtha's former chief of staff. PMA was raided by the FBI last fall, and is being investigated for allegedly tying campaign contributions to earmarks doled out by Murtha and by another member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, Rep. Pete Visclosky. Just in the last two years, Murtha has steered earmarks totaling around $93 million to PMA clients, and since 2002 he has taken in around $1.75 million from PMA and its clients.

Ominously, O'Hair has said he will cooperate with the Feds. Coherent's CEO, Richard Ianieri, who earlier this month pleaded guilty to soliciting kickbacks, has also indicated he'll cooperate.

If the Democrats have a Ted Stevens, the closest guy is Jack Murtha. He managed to keep his House job in 2008, but 2010 is looking more iffy, and there have been a lot of questions surrounding Jack Murtha for some time now. The obvious question now is who are Ianieri and O'Hair flipping on? If it's Murtha, and it breaks soon, another piece of the GOP's "2010 is 1994" playbook may just fall into place.

One of the big contributing factors to the success of the GOP's push in 1994 was the "Culture of Corruption" attacks on House Dems that ran into legal trouble in the early 90's. The House banking scandal, and the Congressional Post Office scandal that led to Dan Rostenkowski's conviction helped convince voters that 50+ years of having the Dems run Congress had made them crooked as hell, and the GOP managed to talk voters into cleaning up.

Murtha, should he run into legal issues himself, won't do it by himself. The GOP showed it could get just as corrupt in just 16 years. But it's certainly not going to help the Dems.

Still, we'll see. There have been grumbling and rumors surrounding Murtha for a long time now.